Advanced wafer lithography and surface-mount packaging technology are integrating increasingly complex functions at both the silicon and printed circuit board level of electronic design. In this regard, it is recognized that diminished physical access is an unfortunate consequence of denser designs and shrinking interconnect pitch. Designed-in testability is needed, so that the finished product is still both controllable and observable during test and debug. Any manufacturing defect is preferably detectable during final test before a product is shipped. This basic necessity is difficult to achieve for complex designs without taking testability into account in the logic design phase, so that automatic test equipment can test the product.
In addition to testing for functionality and for manufacturing defects, application software development requires a similar level of simulation, observability and controllability in the system or sub-system design phase. The emulation phase of design should ensure that an IC (integrated circuit), or set of ICs, functions correctly in the end equipment or application when linked with the software programs.
With the increasing use of ICs in the automotive industry, telecommunications, defense systems, and life support systems, thorough testing and extensive real-time debug becomes a critical need.
Functional testing, wherein a designer is responsible for generating test vectors that are intended to ensure conformance to specification, still remains a widely used test methodology. For very large systems this method proves inadequate in providing a high level of detectable fault coverage. Automatically generated test patterns would be desirable for full testability, and controllability and observability are key goals that span the full hierarchy of test (from the system level to the transistor level).
Another problem in large designs is the long time and substantial expense involved. It would be desirable to have testability circuitry, system and methods that are consistent with a concept of design-for-reusability. In this way, subsequent devices and systems can have a low marginal design cost for testability, simulation and emulation by reusing the testability, simulation and emulation circuitry, systems and methods that are implemented in an initial device. Without a proactive testability, simulation and emulation approach, a large of subsequent design time is expended on test pattern creation and grading.
Even if a significant investment were made to design a module to be reusable and to fully create and grade its test patterns, subsequent use of module may bury it in application specific logic, and make its access difficult or impossible. Consequently, it is desirable to avoid this pitfall.
The advances in IC design, for example, are accompanied by decreased internal visibility and control, reduced fault coverage and reduced ability to toggle states, more test development and verification problems, increased complexity of design simulation and continually increasing cost of CAD (computer aided design) tools. In the board design the side effects include decreased register visibility and control, complicated debug and simulation in design verification, loss of conventional emulation due to loss of physical access by packaging many circuits in one package, increased routing complexity on the board, increased costs of design tools, mixed-mode packaging, and design for produceability. In application development, some side effects are decreased visibility of states, high speed emulation difficulties, scaled time simulation, increased debugging complexity, and increased costs of emulators. Production side effects involve decreased visibility and control, complications in test vectors and models, increased test complexity, mixed-mode packaging, continually increasing costs of automatic test equipment even into the 7-figure range, and tighter tolerances.